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> That remains to be seen What would a more powerful USA look like? It doesn't appear that the country is after an empire the same way the British had one 100
by Redoubts 10y ago
> That remains to be seen
What would a more powerful USA look like? It doesn't appear that the country is after an empire the same way the British had one 100 years ago, so raw aggression is out. I can't imagine a realistic scenario that doesn't require the implosion of other nations to embiggen America.
- smelterdemon 10y agoWealth is not a zero sum game.
- gnaritas 10y agoThat depends on how you generate it. When apple builds wealth, not zero sum; when a hedge fund builds wealth; zero sum. 40% of our economy is financial services now, there's a lot of zero sum wealth creation going on.
- jjeaff 10y agoEven hedge funds aren't zero sum. They receive dividends on the investments they hold which is a return that is not zero sum. Of course, the more active a fund is, the farther it gets from zero sum, but it would never be fully zero sum. Additionally, financial services overall are far from zero sum. There is a great deal of efficiency and market lubrication created by financial services and if you exclude the high frequency traders, you leave a huge majority that is still quite beneficial to people on both sides of the transaction.
- gnaritas 10y ago> Even hedge funds aren't zero sum. They receive dividends on the investments they hold which is a return that is not zero sum. Once again, that depends on the trade, short term trades don't make their money from dividends, but from timing the market. > Additionally, financial services overall are far from zero sum. Beside the point, plenty of them are zero-sum-never said they were all zero-sum; that exception exist doesn't change the point that zero-sum vs non-zero-sum is a false dichotomy, the real world is both zero-sum and non-zero-sum, depending on the way the wealth is being generated. It's tiresome watching people continually repeat the incorrect mantra that wealth isn't a zero-sum game when quite often, it is.
- atkinswj 10y agoEmbiggen?
- bduerst 10y agoImperialism is alive and well today, it's just that it's less noticeable since total war has been infeasible since the atomic age.
- dpc59 10y agoGo tell that to people who live in Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Palestine or Libya.
- ommunist 10y agoYugoslavia, Serbia, Ukraine, Turkey...
- bduerst 10y agoPuppet wars, not Total War. There's a difference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war We haven't experienced Total War in our lifetime (thankfully), but when referencing the imperial dynasties in history as being more noticeable, it's usually because the wars they held were total.
- evanb 10y agoIt's a perfectly cromulent word. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcxsgZxqnEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcxsgZxqnEg
- arcticfox 10y agoAn even more wealthy USA? Imagine one of those horror scenarios where robots / automation start taking over many, many jobs and the multinationals that own them are based out of the US. Not saying it would happen but I think that's one scenario that would be even "more powerful".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- choosername 10y agoWith off shore holding accounts, do google et al count?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- clock_tower 10y ago> What would a more powerful USA look like? Passenger rail; durable houses; less unemployment and more labor-force participation; a population not balkanized along political/cultural lines.
- wernercd 10y agoWith an increase in immigration and a cheapening of robotic workers and kiosks... where is this decrease in unemployment and increase in labor-force participation going to come from? I mean, there is "always" going to be jobs for plumbers and spots for artisan made stuff... but those jobs aren't going to replace the amount of jobs that will be lost when $15 becomes more expensive than iRobot...
- zanny 10y agoA UBI, supplied taxafion, and significant deregulation would enable citizens to participate in the economy on much more liberal terms and you would almost always see participation rates rise while total hours worked fall.
- zanny 10y agosimplified taxation*. Yay autocorrect on mobile from hours ago.
- fedora_hat 10y ago200 years most people farmed, 15 years ago SEO, apps, and YouTubers didn't exist either, yes YouTubers... News jobs are already being created.
- gnaritas 10y ago> News jobs are already being created. Not fast enough to replace the abolished ones, and most of those new jobs are knowledge work, which can't scale as there's a IQ floor that will stop most people from being able to work them. The more we shift to knowledge work, the higher unemployment will climb. You're making the mistake of thinking the past predicts the future, but today's automation is unprecedented, it will not follow the same pattern because it has different effects.
- vox_mollis 10y agoIt doesn't appear that the country is after an empire the same way the British had one 100 years ago US empire is defined more by squashing incipient threats to its global hegemony than by UK-style colony management.
- vkou 10y agoUK-style colony management was also largely about access to colonial resources, and colonial markets. Colonial management was a means to that end. The US empire is doing precisely that, through a mixture of soft and hard power.
- chipsy 10y agoTo put it another way, the British Empire had a "merchantalist" foundation - maintain a positive balance of trade and surplus material assets by forcing its colonies to engage in trade on preferential terms - while the U.S. has been "free trade" oriented in its imperial years, with balance of trade being less important than retaining GDP. Both have imperial dynamics, but for the U.S. the important part is being the "world's policeman" as it comes with the authority to destabilize regions and install puppets where their sovereign governments may act against U.S. interests. With this more limited administrative footprint, they're free to focus on use of violence and propaganda, while taking up domestic market policies that benefit net importer businesses and thus justify maintaining the empire. Where people say that the Pax Americana is ending it is in part because the dynamic has grown more multipolar since the end of the Cold War, with a diverse group of nations asserting their interests without being overthrown.
- the_watcher 10y ago> I can't imagine a realistic scenario that doesn't require the implosion of other nations to embiggen America. This has happened! In the past 30 years, no less.
- disordinary 10y agoThe USA has a huge empire, probably the largest ever seen, but it's not an empire of government expansion it's an empire built by companies and culture.
- velodrome 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power
- ygmelnikova 10y agoWho's the emperor?
- malloryerik 10y agoEmpire is the wrong term. It's misleading, it's fraught, it leads to lazy thinking, facile notions and comparisons, and can facilitate unjustified anti-Americanism on one side, cavalier adventurism on another (think Cheney, neocons, AEI), and perhaps isolationism in a current sense ("we're an empire but we shouldn't be"). "Superpower" is better.
- disordinary 10y agoWhat constitutes an empire though, the US is more than twice the size of the Roman Empire at it's peak. Surely that is not an empire? It also influences other countries to an extent which is similar to other empires like the British did. It invades countries to keep trade going, and it's companies dominate the world much like the companies of the British empire did. The only difference is that the US has finished expanding. So what really constitutes an empire? Does it need an emperor? Does it need to constantly be questing to expand in lands?
- malloryerik 10y agoThe definition of empire is a group of states or countries ruled by a single supreme authority. All other uses of the term are metaphorical. We can talk about the McDonald's hamburger empire. When we talk about the American Empire, we're also using the term metaphorically, because think what you will of the US, but it doesn't rule as a supreme authority over anything but a few islands. It may have friends, allies, interests, influence, bargaining power, but it has no subjects, no subjugated peoples. It may have largely founded what is now the world's economic and security order after WWII, but those are all voluntary. The problem is that the overlap between superpower and empire makes the term empire confusing in the American case. "Powerful like an empire" and "an empire" are very different. When we talk or think about the "American Empire", we seek similarities and ignore differences with the Roman Empire, European colonial empires, even the Athenian Empire or Soviet Empire. It makes it sound like the US can tell other countries what to do as it pleases, that the US rules over others. That's a very important mistake, even a dangerous mistake. Allies are not subjects. When a country asks the US military to leave, it leaves. See the Philippines as a good example (and further back as an example of the bad old days, when the US was briefly interested in having a real empire). Today's US is an empire in the sense that Microsoft is an empire -- it is an empire of the willing who can leave whenever they like. And if you can leave whenever you'd like, it's not a real empire.
- jomamaxx 10y agoThe USA is at 'peak' , we can roughly say this, not because of anything America is doing, but because the 'rest of the world' is coming online. 50 years ago there was 'America', the 'Soviets' and 'Europe'. Everything else was a footnote. What we've seen with China 'coming out of nowhere' in the last 25 years is about to happen 4x with the rest of the world. America and Europe's share of global economy is falling fast, and it simply has to do with electricity, plumbing, democracy, knowledge and productivity gains in the rest of the world. India is coming on a little slowly, but surely. Pakistan is 180 Million people. Nigeria almost that - and they have oil. Africa is a billion people. There are a lot of Asians outside of China, India and Japan. As they start to become connected to the global economy, relative power shift will happen. I don't see the emergence of any new 'superpower' and America will likely remain the only 'superpower' in the classical sense, but it won't be as powerful as it is today - relatively speaking. If you look at the growth of Japan after WW2 - a period of fast growth, then slowing down as it approaches parity with the west - this is what the underdeveloped world will look like, but a little slower. Also - a very important point - a lot of real growth is not measured in the GDP. For example, the value that is created by governments is measured simply in 'government spending'. But $1 of gov. spending hopefully creates more value than $1! For example, if the US Gov spent $50B and created this amazing national public transport system that everyone used, and cost next to nothing - the 'economic surplus' would be massive, but the GDP would directly be down. Why? Because the only thing that would count towards the GDP would be the $50B spent by the gov, not the $Trillion in value derived from it. Obviously, there would be indirect business benefits ... point being - the GDP is not necessarily the best way to measure things for many obvious reasons.
- e12e 10y ago> I don't see the emergence of any new 'superpower' and America will likely remain the only 'superpower' in the classical sense, but it won't be as powerful as it is today - relatively speaking. Maybe. But the trend towards privatising military force could end up accelerating USA's slide down in terms of military power. If we are indeed moving back to the "normal" (historically speaking) "neo medieval" world were military force is generally mercenary and not national standing armies - coupled with the commodization of advanced military technology - the world could radically change quite quickly. Maybe the USA won't be able to pay its contractors - and China and/or Russia can? Maybe China will restructure the PLA as the world's biggest military contractor? I don't really think you are wrong - but it can be tricky to predict the future. Perhaps especially the sudden stumbles we seem to make every so often as a species back into new dark ages and decent into chaos.